Making image thumbnails in bulk can be a rough process. Until now I’ve used Easy Thumbnails to batch create the thumbnails on Windows, but I just found a program called ThumbGen today that is extremely simple to use.
With ThumbGen all you have to do is drag over the images from Windows Explorer that you want thumbnails for. Then you pick the constraints on the dimensions, the prefix/suffix, and the resulting file type (JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG). That’s it!
I’ll admit that it isn’t as full-featured as it could be (can’t add a watermark, border, etc…), but it’s free and straightforward. I also think that there should be a portable version of this offered since it is a mere 451KB download, and it only adds a handful of files to your computer (It does save some settings in your Windows profile though). I’d love to carry this thing around on my USB drive.
If you’ve got a better batch thumbnail creator that’s free be sure to let us know, but ThumbGen is looking pretty darn good.
IrfanView is not limited to be a thumbnail creator but for sure it would be the tool of my choice to create thumbnails – and yes, it is free.
The easiest is to use Thumbnail view, select the images you’d like to save a thumb and choose File – “Save selected thumbs as single images…”
I’d recommend to use “Start batch dialog with selected files…” (or press “B”) – you’ll find the resize options behind the “Set advanced options” button.
Well, a bit more complex it offers tons of options what you can do with Images – and I’d definitely would prefer to have mighty tiny IrfanView on my USB stick.
I’ve used that before, and while it is nice it is often a lot more than what I need. I find this to be a lot faster for creating thumbnails.